It was a painful 50 minutes, but I listened to the entirety of Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux patting each other on the back, in this video, Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse. I think you can tell from the title that there is not much hope for rational discussion here, and from the two speakers, you know it’s going to be awful. What I did was listen while I was engaged in some other work, and just extract a few paraphrases of the conversation now and then, when they said something particularly tiresome.
And really, that’s what it’s all about: reciting cliches at each other without thought, repeating bogus accusations we’ve all heard a thousand times before. These are not people who think very deeply about much of anything.
So what I’ve done below is scribble down the general tenor of the discussion. This is not a transcript. I’ve included some time points so if you really want to, you can go back and check on all the context.
First thing they got into was how offended (word chosen intentionally) they were at the outrageous namecalling going on.
1:20 (PB) nastiness, invective, namecalling, slurs. He doesn’t like the Left — they have atrocious behavior.
(SM): They were rude to Ann Coulter! They make direct death threats! They’re monsters!
(PB): How did we come to the point where we can’t have adult conversations?
(SM): They’re emotionally invested.
(PB): It’s a culture of “we’re offended” and political correctness.
These are themes they return to multiple times. “They” are so rude. “They” are insulting. “They” are offended, and we don’t give a damn if “they” take offense.
This is a dishonest trivializing tactic. One could argue that they, as atheists, are merely offended by religion; therefore they don’t have any reasonable arguments. But that would be dishonest! Of course atheists have solid points to make against religion…just as feminists have solid points to make against the blithely sexist culture of modern atheism. But Boghossian and Molyneux can just sweep those aside by simply claiming they’re political correctness run amuck.
Also, notice how they accuse a mysterious, unnamed “Left” of being insulting, while actively insulting them. It’s as if they have no sense of irony at all. Also note how Boghossian claims to be the adult here, implying that everyone else on the other side is childish. This is a bit of a verbal tic with Boghossian, and as you’ll see below, he repeats it over and over again. I’m beginning to think that his real beef is that he’s got no imagination, and his opponents manage to be far more creative in their insults than he is.
Curiously, Boghossian is having a conversation with Molyneux, who is notorious for his misogynist remarks. Not just the mild, unthinking sexism that so many Atheist Thinky Leaders engage in, but outright contempt for women. This is the guy who claims that women are the root of all evil, because Women have to be held accountable for choosing assholes.
They have sex with assholes and have little baby assholes, none of which is the father’s fault, but entirely due to women’s evil choices.
You might be wondering who these “they” are — they refer to “them” constantly through the video. But there’s only one place where anyone is mentioned by name.
5:00 (PB) PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Ophelia Benson, and Greta Christina.
Interesting. We’re the enemy, and they get to make clumsy elisions, accusing “them” of making bomb threats, death threats, and shouting down people with bullhorns. But the only people they name don’t do any of that. Drawing lazy equivalences is just something philosophers do, I guess.
Then we get a flurry of repetition.
6:10 (PB) we need to argue in an adult way
8:20 (PB) the woman was not capable of having an adult conversation
11:00 (PB) many people in the atheist movement have lost the ability to have an adult conversation
It got to be really annoying. This is Boghossian’s go-to putdown, and he says it constantly.
Brace yourselves. It’s going to get weird.
11:20 (PB) if someone accuses Sam Harris of sexism, you’re making the women suffer!
12:10 (PB) why do they go after Dawkins and Harris?
(SM) Because they’re white males.
Daring to point out that Sam Harris said something sexist means you’re hurting women. Criticizing atheists for sexism while clitoridectomies are going on is bad. They make a kind of “Dear Muslima” argument here.
(PB) The left are the new racists. They’re the ones who think in terms of the color of their skin or gender.
13:50 (SM) The left says race doesn’t exist.
They want us to be color-blind, I guess. Ignore historical and current patterns of discrimination that selectively affect certain populations unfairly, and do nothing to offset that discrimination. Pretending that there is a level playing field when there definitely isn’t is apparently the only strategy our rational, reality-based philosophers will accept.
15:10 (PB) People have lost the ability to have an adult conversation.
Shut up, Peter, you’re sounding like a broken record.
16:40 (PB) I’m not committed to any ideology.
Oh, what nonsense. Of course you are, but apparently, you aren’t aware of it. Everyone has preconceptions and a mental model of the world, and a freakin’ philosopher ought to be acutely conscious of that.
Also, where did this idea that being totally free of any ideological framework is a virtue come from? It’s not. It’s a lie. It’s part of the rhetorical strategy of declaring that I have an accurate representation of the world, you have an ideology.
17:10 (PB) they can’t even present the evidence in a rational way
18:30 (PB) these cultures of being offended
19:00 (SM) Thought-crime!
20:10 (PB) This fringe have hijacked a narrative…these cultures of offense; they conflate disagreement with harassment.
Christ, this is annoying. Of course we present rational arguments, with evidence. When we say that Sam Harris said something sexist, we quote the words he said in context. We make these arguments over and over, and these wackos with an authoritarian ideology simply shut down at the thought that we’d disagree with an Atheist Thinky Leader.
We might be offended — Molyneux in particular is an expert at saying grossly offensive things — but what’s at the heart of what we say is principled disagreement.
There is no thought crime here. The impression I get is that they’re appalled that Dawkins and Harris get criticized — do they even realize that no one has argued to silence or jail or execute either of those guys? We respond to their speech with more speech, which is what we’re supposed to do.
21:30 (PB) People are not having adult conversations.
24:00 (SM) They’re offense robots.
25:00 (PB) Where does all this vitriol and bile and anger come from?
25:40 (PB) How can we make people talk as adults?
26:30 (PB) She had some issue that prevented her from having an adult conversation.
Fuck off, Peter.
Molyneux now goes off on a long tangent explaining how women really aren’t discriminated against.
26:50 (SM) culture of victimhood
28:00 (SM) women choose to have children, explains pay differences
31:00 (PB) graciously admits that he’s willing to consider the possibility that women are a privileged class.
Oh. Right. Women choose to have children, and fathers have nothing to do about that. Do they even realize the problem here? That we as a culture devalue “women’s work”, like child-rearing, and that we reflexively pretend that men should be excused from the responsibilities of house work and taking care of babies?
That does NOT justify paying women less, or pretending that having children is a less-valued activity than working overtime.
Get your puke buckets ready now.
31:00 (PB) Women having their clitorises removed is “legitimate victimhood”.
Just like there is legitimate rape and illegitimate rape, apparently the only real victimhood is being physically mutilated — being passed over for a promotion, being relegated to demeaning work, getting paid less for the same job, while clearly not as devastating as having a knife taken to your body, are apparently not real problems of oppression.
33:40 (PB) the best way to address this issues is in an adult manner
34:10 (PB) cultures of being offended, again
37:00 (PB) we’re not ready to have an honest conversation
37:40 (PB) There are certain members of our community that are not behaving in an adult way
Fuck off, Peter.
39:00 (SM) Atheists experience more discrimination than members of minorities.
Seriously? Two privileged white male dudes sitting around talking about how they’re the real victims? It’s impossible to take these guys seriously.
40:00 (PB) I don’t want to be repetitive…
Too late!
40:30 (PB) It’s time we stopped looking at the color of people’s skin or their gender
This is why atheism has such difficulty getting credibility with women and people of color…because we have so many asshats who glibly deny the reality of their experiences. Hey, everyone, just pretend you’re a white man! Problem solved!
42:00 (SM) The real sexists and racists are the ones who benefit when the conversation is shut down…
Like when Sam Harris is criticized? That’s all they’ve got. That Harris and Dawkins have been publicly criticized is, to these two bozos, racist and sexist.
43:50 (PB) We need to have an adult conversation.
Bite me, Peter, you tiresome drone.
44:30 (PB) The real victims are the women who suffer from sexism.
45:00 (PB) We ought not to bully ideas off the table.
The only people trying to bully ideas off the table are these guys trying to imply that arguing with Atheist Thinky Leaders is somehow “bullying”. The only thought crime is disagreeing with Atheist Thinky Leaders. The only idea off the table to these two is the sense that we should be aware of patterns of discrimination and actively work to oppose them.
And now I feel so dirty. Blecch.
The mansplainin’ was certainly toxic. And typical.
They want an adult conversation, they can start having an intellectual adult conversation themselves. By acknowledging facts as facts, not just their opinions of the facts as facts.
No thanks. Not interested in what they have to say. They’ve proven themselves to be shallow.
I’m not buying what they’re selling. Except if it’s an abject apology, which I don’t see forthcoming.
Another thing that’s really annoying: a lot of people buy into Boghossian’s “street epistemology”, and they keep sending me videos of themselves ‘engaging’ with the public. I watched a few of them, and realized that I’d seen that approach before: it’s the Ray Comfort tactic! Meet people on the street, lead them into a series of loaded questions, and then declare that “Hey! So you’re an atheist!” (or “Hey, you’re a Christian,” if you’re Ray Comfort).
Talking to people with a prepared script ain’t philosophy, and it’s not honest engagement.
Well I have to say that this is easily one of the most childish conversations I’ve ever seen. Grats Peter.
Right. Women are totally capable of parthenogenesis, with no sperm required, and have full control of their fertility without outside aid. So reproduction is a choice totally removed from men! Also, there’s no social pressure attached to the choice.
(Also, if atheists experience discrimination, and racial minorities experience discrimination, then I imagine atheists of color experience at least as much discrimination as white atheists and theists of color, and possibly more, since there are avenues of discrimination that tend to only affect some groups*.)
The real sexists and racists are the ones who benefit when the conversation is shut down…
Like the way we can’t talk about if Famous White Dude might be racist or sexist, or at least have problematic past actions**? That sort of shutting down?
* For instance, I can pass as Christian in most of my trivial day to day interactions (going to the store, walking past a police officer) because the majority assume everyone around them shares their beliefs until otherwise stated, but most racial minorities can pass as white in face-to-face interactions.
** Like almost everyone in a racist, sexist culture, even people who are usually good allies, or even female or racial minorities.
” these wackos with an authoritarian ideology simply shut down at the thought that we’d disagree with an Atheist Thinky Leader.”
Ironic since Molyneux is an “anarcho” capitalist, i.e a believer in “free markets” (including in ideas) and “liberty”. Of course, his version of anarchism is more or less “get that government away from my ability to exploit people with piles of money, the most dangerous power structure ever invented”, while actual anarchists oppose all unjustified power structures.
I think Molyneux was also in the news recently for throwing bogus DMCA claims at people critiquing his videos on Youtube. Free market in ideas, indeed, unless you criticize the Atheist Leaders or Serious Libertarians.
Filing the title “Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse” under the heading of “Inadvertently Honest”.
Wow. That was depressing.
I’m sorry, but if there is anything non-adult, it’s this statement. Really, Peter Boghossian, what if I said “It’s time we stopped looking at people’s religion or their spiritual beliefs”? Of course, they accept that religions beliefs cause harm, but they think that sexist and racist beliefs (if they even exist in their minds) are good and proper because of completely accurate, unbiased bell curve studies that deserve no skeptical inquiry.
@PZ Myers #3:
That goes right along with the “we’re the ones really being oppressed” talking point.
@changerofbits #9:
It sounds like the sort of naive, oversimplified moral you’d expect at the end of a He-Man cartoon.
Fucking hell, i only just found out who this Boghossian guy was in Greta’s blog, and i wasn’t expecting anything good from him, but this…wow….And the cherry on top is that they are using “adult conversation” in the same way that Dawkins uses “rational” which is “agreeing with everything i say, no matter how wrong, irrational or infantile”.
* Not at all…
What a couple of fucking low-bar morons. Peter Boghossian is supposedly paid as an actual philosopher, so why the fuck is he repeating the same claims that first year poli sci students were making in 1993?
Did they ask why it’s not racist to say cracker but it is to say n*gger, or did they just cite the Journal of Fox News Anchors as prior research?
well, from the getgo, one can see that they are twits since they fantasize that atheists can’t be feminists in the title.
way to go! showing that you can’t handle reality.
@12
xDDD The astherisc should have been removed when i changed my mind and edited my post O_o Sorry.
Or should it? Chanananaaaaaan…..
He actually said he took his son to TAM to stop any “accusations”?
” I thought it would minimise the risk that I would be accused of something”
Fuck. Are these people for real. I sometimes think I’m in the wrong group. give me Russell Brand any day. Even David Icke doesn’t talk as much shit as these two.
Are you sure you weren’t just listening to a 5 minute loop 10 times?
“Patting each other on the back.” You are using that phrase euphemistically, yes? Because it sounded like something else that dudebros like to do.
Did Bogosity ever study with Colin McGinn? Sounds like they’d get on like a house on fire.
Forgive me for wanting them to get on in a house on fire.
So… I don’t have the time or patience to give up 50 minutes right now – I have games to play and stress to work out, damn it – but…
I thought it was science that said that? Genetics and anthropology? That it’s basically just a set of arbitrary classifications with little relation to reality, which flip around seemingly at random when one crosses borders? Am I wrong in that?
Speaking as a white, male-bodied person, grow up. Yes, white males who strut around the place pontificating on issues about which they know nothing, partially because of their privilege, while denying that privilege is a thing do tend to be received poorly. I know, because I used to be one of those guys. I also know – because I was skeptical enough to consider that, regardless of whether the criticisms were “adult” in tone, criticisms are worth considering and adjusting to if valid – that white males who make efforts to understand the things that they’re talking about, listen when those who experience them directly speak, and interject with honest questions and rationality rather than baseless assertions are generally received well. We still get chewed out, from time to time, because we still miss obvious things that other groups are fully aware of and stick our feet in our mouths without thinking, but, if you’re willing to address these issues in an adult manner, you can actually cope with and respond to criticism.
and…
Seriously, get a fucking clue. Yes, sure, there are legal discriminations against atheists that are still in place, and yes, we do face prejudice, but nobody is debating whether we have the right to marry. We are not being murdered or raped by the people who are supposedly paid to protect us. If you want to play oppression Olympics, you know, make sure that you can at least place on the podium.
The new party line on race is evidently that the enlightened ones are so non-racist that they don’t even see race or gender. I wonder which NY Times op-ed this one originated from. Anyway, minorities are defined by the dominant group. Black people would love to stop talking about race it’s just that they are forced to because they are discriminated against.
@20 Athywren
No, you are not, that’s basically what the science says. It’s just that some people don’t like that that’s the biological reality and prefer to scoff at the idea that their concepts of race could possibly be made of smoke and dreams. One good way to do this is to pretend that this is not the consensus in biology, but rather an agenda pushed “by the left”.
Although, obviously, since they are philosophers they certainly know a lot better than biologists what the biological reality of our species is anyway…*vomits*
I read Boghossian’s “street epistemology” book. To paraphrase the late, great Dorothy Parker: This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Nope, you’re not wrong. But, of course, talking out of one’s ass instead of looking at the literature is only a problem when creationists do it.
I’m frankly sick of these people who like to pretend feelings don’t matter. Like they’re perfect rational robots and aren’t emotionally involved at all. People have feelings, it’s part of the human condition, and it’s a good thing. And you know what, people’s feelings should probably actually be respected, at least to some extent. Rational argument or evaluating ideas doesn’t mean leaving emotion at the curb, it means looking at what’s feeding your emotion, trying to determine if there are factual matters that outweigh your own emotional response, trying to figure out when emotionally loaded language or behavior is fooling you. But not just pretending emotions aren’t real or don’t matter.
There’s nothing wrong with being offended and pointing out that you’re offended. There’s nothing wrong with taking another person’s feelings into account and making a modicum of effort not to be offensive.
And when your offensiveness is also based on your own emotional responses and not on facts at all, it’s more than a tad hypocritical.
What is an offense robot? Like Ultron?
But, gussnarp, we’re the robots. Offense robots. They’re Vulcan robots? Or perfectly rational, adult humans? It’s unclear.
Funny how the men who take the most umbrage at the hypothesis that white men, as a class, just suck are always the ones who work the hardest to provide evidence for that same hypothesis.
The discussion of women and children makes me wonder if they aren’t going for the “sophisticated theology” version of a nasty old trope, that there are all these women lying in wait for poor innocent Joe Blow, hoping to get pregnant at the first opportunity, so they can suck him dry, and give nothing in return. Then again maybe there’s some class prejudice going on here as well. These jokers might be sufficiently high up the class chain that the women with children they know of can afford things like full time nannies and regular house cleaning service, leaving them free to do whatever they think it is well off women with servants do. And, clueless as they seem to be, they assume that applies to all women.
If these guys actually wanted a discourse, a good place to start would be by not using phrasing that automatically excludes feminists and “minorities” from the category of “atheists”.
Why do people laugh at clueless fucking white guys?
Only clueless fucking white guys don’t know.
You know, for a couple of implicitly thick-skinned, not-overly-emotional, uber-rational thinkbros, these guys sure do spend an inordinate amount of time whining about how oppressed they are by, well, the mysterious “Left” and … a small number of bloggers? That’s it? Shite, you’d think a proper Man™ would just sack up and get on with building his metaphorical log cabin instead of spending an hour complaining incessantly that none of the people he’s already decided to hate want to have an adult conversation with him. Ron Swanson from “Parks & Recreation” would not only have a few choice words for these weak-willed marshmallows, he’d also be far more politically progressive (look him up).
Based on his history, Molyneux we can dismiss as a cookie-cutter crank; Boghossian appears to be a different kettle of fish. He comes across as someone who sort of missed the New Atheist thing when it was still shiny and new (I only heard his name for the first time last year, plugging his book on Stephanie Zvan’s Minnesota Atheists’ podcast, then nothing until last week) and now appears to be opportunistically jockeying for a spot with the Establishment Atheist Thinky Council King Lords (“Hey, you guys think bitches aint shit and lefties are Hitler? Me too me too!”). I could be wrong, though, and Boghossian’s merely yet another raging Tory arsehole with highly selectively applied philosophical skill who happens to not be religious. But you can’t deny that right now, for a lot of atheobros, calling anyone who publicly disagrees with you or criticises your words a “bully” and slagging off women appears to be the Golden Ticket.
Whatever. Fuck Establishment Atheism and all who sail in it (and all who aspire to). If the silverbacks who’ve appointed themselves our “leaders” can’t recognise or reasonably respond to the fact that the ethnic and social demographics of atheism are changing – and so are changing the focus of many conversations within atheism and starting many new ones – then they aren’t fucking “leading” anything. Right now, if anything, they’re a roadblock.
Hm. PZ, did something in my comment trigger a filter or did I just arse something up?
This looks practically identical to just about any right-wing screed on the topic. You could have tuned into Christian talk radio or Rush Limbaugh and found the same script.
The basic strategy is to invert the positions of the powerful and the downtrodden so that the over-privileged demographic to which you belong is now society’s most victimized group, then whine about how persecuted you are by the all-powerful blacks/women/gays/etc. To make the hypocrisy come full circle, complain about how those whiny minorities are always seeking victim status.
Odd, I had always learned as a child that phrases like “loathsome shitweasel” and “preening narcissistic fuckwit” were adult-only. On that basis, saying, “Molyneux is a loathsome shitweasel and Boghossian is a preening narcissistic fuckwit; both should be marginalized from any position of recognition or authority and then roundly ignored for the rest of time,” is necessarily part of an adult conversation – an adult-only conversation, in fact.
@SallyStrange @28: Lewis’s Corollary?
Also, this title?
The irony of its unintentional truth is as hilarious as David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies. These people really do lack all sense of irony (which makes sense: the ability to irony requires self-reflexive awareness, which in turn requires recognizing one’s sociocultural position in relation to other people and one’s environments – if they could do that, they probably wouldn’t be saying any of this), which might well play into what PZ suggests here:
Really, all I needed was to read the title. The inanity, histrionics, and hypocrisy was already obvious in just those few words.
Might as well have been “Witch hunting thought police: Why are they so hysterical?”
Or ‘Women, Gays, and Those Kinds: Stupid, Deluded, or Just Evil? A Rational Discussion of Objective Truths by Some Heavily Oppressed Members of the Hardest Group to Live As.’
But I think the oligarchs cancelled the truth in advertising laws as inimical to their corporation-neighbours’ free speech rights, so tough prawn-and-brie crackers to you, peons.
You can’t be fucking serious. Words mean things you idiots, you don’t get to redefine them any way you want, not if you want to be taken seriously anyway. Or to use some other colorful verbiage, stop intellectually masterbating in public. It’s not the adult thing to do.
@38, scienceavenger:
Are you lampooning Boghossian’s tweet?
Because well done.
Gosh, everyone here at FreeThought Blogs is so unable to have adult conversations, unlike those two adult-like adults with their adulthood and… committing lots of… adultery????
Oh, nice.
But there are illegitimate uses of the word, “pride,” sir. There are! If I refer to the breakfast variation that I ran through this morning as, “eating a slice of pride,” I would quite definitely be using the word pride illegitimately, as toast is not pride. Unless it’s Pride brand bread toast, I guess. I really hope there’s a Pride brand of bread.
I would suggest that this means that the word does have meaning. It’s just not a narrow meaning.
We’re children, robots, baboons, SJWs, (FT)bullies, [insert slur here]s, drones, hivemind, manginas & feminazis; GamerGaters say that their opponents are NPCs, the tactic of dehumanization is both blatant and distressing. I know according to St. Thunderf00t’s First Epistle to the Church at YouTube that no gamer hath ever lethally harmed a woman, but dehumanizing, grandiose rhetoric certainly doesn’t make that a less likely outcome.
This is 100% true, though. Just the other day, I was pulled over for driving while atheist, because I was driving through a Christian neighborhood with a nice car, so the cops thought I stole it. When my atheist friend in the passenger seat went for his ID, after being told to do so, they drew their guns, broke my window, and dragged him out and tazed him. I had to wait in line for six hours to vote yesterday, because they closed the polling place in my atheist neighborhood, so now all the atheists in the area have to go to the same little location. It might have gone faster, but they were checking everyone’s IDs; they took driver’s licenses, but they’d only take student IDs from religious colleges, and they wouldn’t accept my American Atheists membership card, though they accepted other people’s church directory info. I keep seeing stories about atheists being killed for playing their podcasts too loudly or holding books that get mistaken for guns or just looking like heathens in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it takes these huge atheist demonstrations to even get the police to pay attention. And even when the demonstrations are peaceful, the protesters are characterized as angry, militant sinners, and they get tear-gassed by riot cops. Meanwhile Christians riot every time William Lane Craig makes a particularly popular speech, and the media just says “saints will be saints.” It’s getting to the point where I just don’t feel safe walking around as an atheist anymore.
Oh, look, it’s Humpty and Dumpty.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Sigh. Rational, my foot.
Daz @ 16
He said that???
Wo. Talk about ironies.
Tom Foss:
lolwut? Do they seriously do that? Holy shit.
On a related note: Do Gamergaters call themselves gamergaters or pro-gamergate? Because I think they do. I’m fairly certain they call their movement itself Gamergate. They call their opponents anti-Gamergate. Which I realized today is ass-backwards: the -gate suffix, like in Watergate and the endless media nontroversies that had -gate added to it (e.g. Climategate), is added to the CONTROVERSY. X-gate refers to the issue itself, the controversy, the thing being opposed (allegedly: lack of ethics in games journalism). So that’s the confusing part. These people should technically be called anti-Gamergate, in that they are opposing the manufactured controversy that they are supposedly fighting against. Instead the people called anti-Gamergate are those opposing the shitflinging mob of idiots, insinuating that the mob itself is Gamergate, which makes the term “Gamergate” make no fucking sense.
I guess that’s just minor fail in comparison to all of their others.
Peter Boghossian also had this to say:
Seems like the man loves to dump on anyone who isn’t a part of his happy little cis/het dudebro party.
Fuck, like minorities and atheists are even mutually exclusive?? This may actually be news to these idiots, but there are POC who are atheists. Maybe they should go ask a few of them whether they are discriminated more for their atheism or their skin color. Of course, the whole point of having a discussion between white men only is so no pesky POC or women might object to any of their ridiculous statements.
Also, really? There were 50 minutes of this drivel? Based solely from the excerpts (because there’s no way I’m suffering my way through that whole thing), they discussed one topic, and they didn’t even discuss it with any depth. Just repeated, self congratulatory blather.
anteprepro@45:
See #16 on http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/10/30/the-top-22-most-ridiculous-things-said-by-8channers-about-anita-sarkeesians-appearance-on-the-colbert-report/
As David Futrelle said on that, “This fella might be spending just a little too much time with the vidya games.”
timberwraith:
Jesus fuck. Fuck that guy. Pedantic, homophobic shitstirrer.
bryanfeir: Damn. That person is fucking delusional. And self-contradictory: if they are better geared, higher levelled, and fight more intelligently, why is it also part of their strategy to keep throwing themselves at us and dying until they win? Apparently they are inherently better and smarter than all of us, but they also need to persevere in order to get…better and smarter?
Gotta love dudebro philosophers and logicians. They are consistently just as good with reasoning as religious apologists.
The only way to make people stop looking at skin color and gender would be by blinding everybody and removing the bit of the brain that specializes in recognizing gender. This is the same abusive asshole logic followed by the dudebros that whine that having clear anti-harassment policies means that no one will ever get to have sex again/ evil feminazi agenda. Criticizing these dudes sexism and racism is sexist and racist according to their sophistamicated philosophy? It’s a good thing there are no gods, or Sophia herself would take offense at their ignorant malice. I believe being turned into stone or dust, or a pig, is the usual penalty for insulting goddesses.
Sally Strange @ 28 “Funny how the men who take the most umbrage at the hypothesis that white men, as a class, just suck are always the ones who work the hardest to provide evidence for that same hypothesis.”
Nice. Every negative comment on the page distilled into one succinct, accurate, and painfully obvious statement.
Consider this stolen with all due admiration.
@antiprepro #45:
Yep. bryanfeir noted the most prominent example, but a quick search of Twitter for “#gamergate NPC” turns up plenty of additional instances. They’re fully convinced that they’re the heroes in an MMO, organizing raids and naming everything “Operation” without noticing that their rhetoric and politics are as villainous as they come.
@timberwraith #46:
No, no, you misunderstand. Boghossian isn’t a homophobe! He’s just asking the questions that you leftist thought police forbid because you’re too emotionally invested! Also, it’s just for the lulz:
Textbook trolling. Should we expect any less from the Ray Comfort of Atheism?
The replies to that tweet are something else, too. When even Miranda Hale and Peter Ferguson are calling you out for being disingenuous trolls, you’ve gone off the Challenger Deep end.
These two douchebuckets should hook up with Owen & Aurini. The ensuing slimy, ham-fisted, back-slapping circle-jerk would go on indefinitely and noone would ever have to hear from them ever again.
anteprepro@50:
And a rotten speller, as so many of them seem to be. I had to keep double-checking to make sure I was making the same mistakes he had been, because that was just a screen-capped image over on WHTM and I had to re-type it all.
And as Tom Foss noted later, they seem to not really notice how out of step they are with the rest of society. Part of this is just standard ‘echo chamber’ problems, but I’ve seen it suggested that some of this is unique to 4chan/8chan culture, where stuff generally drops out of sight after a few days and they don’t really seem to grasp the whole concept of ‘we can still see that thing you said last month, you know…’.
The classic case of this was when several of the IRC chat logs were released to show that some of what they said had been taken out of context… and the context actually made what was said even worse. It’s almost guaranteed that they figured nobody would actually bother reading several dozen pages of chat logs in order to find the evidence for their assertions, they just figured they could point at it and everybody else would go ‘tl;dr’ and leave it at that.
There was an episode of the Daily Show recently where they showed a clip of some asshat saying something similar, and Jon responded “Did you just ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ racism?”
Remember the days when atheists disagreed with Ben Stein?
Careful Peter! If the Left gets wind of your brave heresies you might get Expelled!
Well, it is a powerful argument. And used quite often to good effect. We’ve all heard that atheism is just another faith, but it takes Boghossian to show us why:
Boghossian and Molyneux just don’t do thinky well. It must be some testosterone vibe.
You know how to improve the video??
Imagine a picture-in-picture of Amanda Seales’ reaction as she listens to it.
As Boghossian says: “We couldn’t possibly help people overcome their delusions when we’ve created these cultures of being offended constantly.” It’s really time to stop digging: cognitive dissonance is invisible until it’s not.
Marcus, #52
Cheers, it’s a public forum. Steal away. Glad you liked it.
Marcus Ranum:
“Amanda Seales reacts to things” ought to be a meme.
Offense robots. Interesting term. Those would be people who keep repeating what they’re offended at by other people, using almost the same words each time, perhaps characterizing the others as merely childish each time, right?
@56 MJP
Here’s the Daily Show clip you were referring to: http://youtu.be/T_98ojjIZDI
Stewart is genuinely angry by the end of it. As well he – and anyone with an ounce of decency – should be.
sirbedevere, #65
I regrettably haven’t kept up with the Daily Show, but that was hilarious and frustrating to watch. Goodness, Sean Hannity is a fucking racist idiot.
It’s a #TestosteroneButtplug – combined anal retentive and butt-clenching.
This supposed “culture of offendedness” isn’t just dismissive, but plain dishonest. If their opponents used arguments that amounted to “I’m offended, therefore you’re wrong”, then they’d have a point. What actually happens, however, is they just label their opponents as “offended” in order to dismiss them.
Especially since they are offended by feminists….They need to look in the mirror.
Dear gods old and new,
Please send serendipitous meteor down upon these two ingrown dickhairs. They are the worst people ever to people.
Love,
Joffrey Baratheon
Every so often I go on a short binge of Daily Show watching on YouTube. Almost every one has some moments that are so brilliant and funny I laugh out loud (literally). Yet after a few I always feel a little ill and depressed because I know that the people and ideas he skewers so deftly are taken seriously by a frightening number of people.
Reading this is the first time I felt sorry for Sam Harris. Their attempted ‘defense’ makes Harris look much worse by association than anything Harris actually said.
@72: perhaps it’s that way to you but for me, nah, I have lots of contempt to spare. I’m happy not to need a judged contest on which is worse than the other; they’re equally reprehensible.
Fucking really?!
No doubt that we experience discrimination, but more than
• trans men and women who are subjected to horrific levels of violence?
• more than women who are denied basic healthcare and the right to control their own bodies?
• more than African-Americans who are thrown in jail at an alarming rate?
Seriously dude, STFU.
****
Sili @19:
As you seem to have no problem wishing harm on others, no, I won’t forgive you. No matter how much we despise certain people, the world is not made a better place by wishing for anyone to die.
Tom Foss wrote:
That’s not even the worst of it. I’ll just quote a bit of a video by FoldableHuman here:
It’s also why the women (and occasional men) they harass are often called “fake gamers”. They’re robbing these people of every scrap of their identity and delegitimizing their inclusion into any part of the subculture.
There are so many parallels and overlaps between the Gators and the atheist anti-feminists, that it’s become quite difficult not to see the clear patterns. In both cases, there are people deeply concerned that if there are people catering to other people’s interests and concerns within the subculture, then they’re being specifically excluded (just as they’ve excluded others), so these people are painted as invaders, and fakers.
He’s like Steve Martin from Leap of Faith. “That’s like step 1. Read the book. Yeah. I wrote a book. forget that I wrote it. Use it. I’ve taught for like 25 years and heard anything that anyone could say.”
jone lewis @64
No, think more in the original meaning of the word ‘robot’ as ‘slave’. They are slaves to offending, both committing and reacting aghast at any offense caused, and follow the routine of citing free speech, tu quoque, false equivalence, reverse racism/sexism/*ism, and are generally just slaves to being upset about being called out on their bullshit.
I mean, that’s what I see it as. :)
Way late to the thread, but Athywren @41:
Well, sort of …
2kittehs, needs more rainbows.
Very disappointing to hear/read this, as Peter’s book on street epistemology is really good.
This is what happens when misogyny meets extremist-libertarianism. This is our future if we don’t win this culture war.